Bioinspired Electrodes for Structural Supercapacitors Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • The demand for efficient energy storage devices has increased tremendously as hybrid vehicles, portable, and even wearable electronics have become a significant and inseparable part of our everyday lives. With respect to the increasing demands for energy storage, new battery and supercapacitor technologies have emerged. However, their high weight and size remain a drag on the development of next-generation electronics. Structural energy storage devices constitute a firm solution since they can potentially address both energy storage and structural functionalities in a single unit leading to mass and volume savings. Here, we utilize the brick and mortar structure of nacre to fabricate mechanically strong supercapacitor electrodes. We report on electrodes consisting of branched aramid nanofibers (BANFs) and reduced dopamine functionalized graphene oxide (rGO-DOPA). Branched aramid nanofibers, nanoscale Kevlar fibers, are promising due to their superior mechanical properties, such as stiffness and tensile strength. Furthermore, rGO is an ideal material for supercapacitor electrodes due to its high surface area and electrical conductivity. Graphene oxide was functionalized with dopamine - a molecule mimicking the highly adhesive mussel proteins - to improve interfacial interactions. The electrodes were fabricated using vacuum filtration, where BANFs interact with GO-DOPA through extensive hydrogen bonding and - stacking interactions. Coordination bonding was also achieved by the addition of calcium ions that cause chelation. The electrodes were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Raman spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). We studied the effect of dopamine functionalization, calcium ion addition and BANF composition on the mechanical and electrochemical performance. Tensile testing, cyclic voltammetry, and galvanostatic charge-discharge were used to evaluate the properties.

published proceedings

  • ECS Meeting Abstracts

author list (cited authors)

  • Flouda, P., Lagoudas, D., & Lutkenhaus, J.

citation count

  • 0

complete list of authors

  • Flouda, Paraskevi||Lagoudas, Dimitris||Lutkenhaus, Jodie

publication date

  • May 2019